Conversation: Syowia Kyambi & Annie E. Coombes

Taking place within the context of the ongoing KASPALE exhibition, the conversation between Annie E. Coombes and Syowia Kyambi unpacks performance as a strategy and the use of the archive in Kyambi's practice, paying attention to questions of site-specificity as it relates to place, and the body; time and temporality; and memory and remembrance. Making reference to works featured in the exhibition, as well to earlier works by the artist, they explore the multiplicity of methodologies in Kyambi’s practice. 

Annie E. Coombes is Professor Emerita of Material and Visual Culture in the Department of History of Art and Founding Director of the Peltz Gallery at Birkbeck, University of London.

Coombes’ research focuses on colonial histories, their legacies in the present and the tensions involved in memorialising such violent histories in the public domain (in Britain, South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria). Her award-winning books include: Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Yale 1994) and History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Duke 2003). In 2014 she published Managing Heritage, Making Peace: History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya, (co-written with Lotte Hughes and Karega Munene).

Coombes has always written for contemporary artists, particularly women, whose practice expands our understanding of the epistemic and actual violence of colonialism and its affect for example, Sonia Boyce ; Joy Gregory; Syowia Kyambi ; Senzeni Marasela ; Lisa Reihana ; Tracey Rose; Berni Searle; Penny Siopis; and Carrie Mae Weems .